n his long years in the House of Representatives, Tip O'Neill must have committed some wisdom other than ''all politics is local,'' but that's the judgment that is permanently linked to his name. Nowadays, of course, all of once distant Washington, and the White House particularly, are treated as local addresses. However, a few publishers believe there is still some interest in politicians who operate in arenas some distance from the Oval Office. On the chance that this is a right call, two New York Republicans have obliged them with some occasionally enlightening results: Susan Molinari and George Pataki.

As Molinari notes in ''Representative Mom'' (the ''Mom'' being in honor of daughter Susan Ruby, age 2), politics has been her family's business. Its base is Staten Island, the least populous and most white of New York City's five boroughs. Her paternal grandfather was the first Italian-born member of the New York State Assembly. Her father, Guy, was elected to the Assembly in 1974 and, six years later, to Congress.

In 1985, Susan, widely known as ''Guy's doll'' because of her 5-foot-2-inch stature, at 27 became the only Republican member of the New York City Council. Eventually, Guy Molinari, having declared himself tired of the commute from Washington, got himself elected Staten Island's Borough President. Arrangements were then made (in 1990) to have Susan Molinari slide into her father's vacant House seat.

The family political roster expanded in 1994 when she married a fellow Representative, Bill Paxon, from suburban Buffalo, a devout member of Newt Gingrich's inner circle. When Paxon asked her to marry him and gave her a ring, he did so on the floor of the House when it was in session. ''His political career,'' Susan Molinari writes, ''wasn't just a job to him. It was his entire life.''

The high point of her time in Congress followed the 1994 Republican landslide, for which Paxon, famous for his campaigning talents, was given considerable credit. With Gingrich's assent, she became the fifth-ranking member of the House leadership, helped write the Contract With America and delivered the keynote address at the 1996 Republican National Convention. Throughout her so-so convention speech, her husband and father sat together near the podium, her father feeding Susan Ruby a bottle. The large tag on his jacket read, not ''Family Values,'' but ''Molinari 2000.''

The most memorable section of this book, written with Elinor Burkett, the author of ''The Right Women,'' deals with a spectacle for which Molinari had a prominent seat. It featured House Republicans and Newt Gingrich, despondent after the Contract With America did not set off the worldwide revolution he had counted on. Other House leaders, including Paxon, began to meet regularly to figure out how Gingrich's change of status -- if it should come to that -- could be handled in an orderly fashion. The coup attempt -- if it can be called that, and many did -- floundered, and Paxon became what he himself described as a political leper.

At a large public meeting of House Republicans a few days later, Sonny Bono tried to cheer Paxon up with a speech about how in the end he had been able to get over even his breakup with Cher -- a reminder that not only is all politics local but it is also a department of show biz.

Susan Molinari asks toward the end of her book how she could work ''with people who found it convenient to shove my husband out of the picture.'' Fortunately, she didn't have to. CBS News had asked her to become a news co-anchor, the kind of assignment that she insisted she had dreamed of all her life. She notes that television is much harder than it looks; last month the network announced that what it called an experiment had ended. In February Paxon had announced that he would never run for office again, explaining that he needed to spend more time with Susan Ruby, an expression that even some of the most faithful believers in family values seemed to have trouble with, even after Susan Molinari announced as she left CBS that she was pregnant again.

Thus, it appears that by the end of this year in the family in which politics was the center not just of business but of life, only Guy Molinari will be on active duty, and because of New York City's term limits law, he too will be on the lookout for some other kind of work at the end of his present term.

The background of the central figure in ''Pataki,'' on the other hand, is a long line of people who had nothing to do with politics, and the book reads like a sunny campaign biography for whatever office he might be running for, now or in the future. The book, written with George Paisner, who also wrote books with Ed Koch and Geraldo Rivera, is not particularly helpful for George Pataki's present race, for re-election as Governor, having little to say about his experiences in state government, which, except for the death penalty law he got on the books, does not seem to interest him much.

However, not being cluttered with Albany small talk could be useful for a campaign that does seem to interest him, that for the Presidency in 2000. He is currently enjoying the benefits of the tattered tradition that New York governors automatically get on possible Presidential lists, even though the last New Yorker who actually made it to the White House was F.D.R.

Four years ago, of course, the voters knew nothing about George Pataki. There was good reason for this. He had twice been elected Mayor of Peekskill, N.Y. (population about 20,000), and had served nine years in the State Legislature without leaving his mark on any significant law.

Nevertheless, Pataki says he was convinced that he would be elected Governor if he could just get the nomination. That was the hard part. New York Republican nominees to any office that counts are chosen by New York's most powerful Republican, Senator Alfonse D'Amato. Pataki describes how he sat humbly by as over several days D'Amato, unable to find a candidate he could live with, finally decided that Pataki, who hadn't been on his original list, would have to do. So little was known about the new Governor, except for the heavy debt he owed the Senator, that one upstate headline the next day asked ''What Is a Pataki?''

For the answer, the Governor's book, ''Pataki,'' is helpful. Most New York governors have been in the forefront of the movement to get a fair shake for city dwellers -- at least since Al Smith, assigned by rural legislators to the Forestry Committee when first he came to the Assembly from the Lower East Side. Pataki came from the farm -- 12 acres at the edge of Peekskill where he, his parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and countless cousins worked together growing fruits and vegetables and selling them from the front porch.

Whole chapters of the book and intermittent references throughout are devoted to the farm, its joys (''One year we had spectacular cucumbers'') and the life lessons it taught. The Patakis boldly planted their tomatoes in April, much earlier than other farmers. The risk rarely paid off, Pataki says, but his grandfather never stopped trying. The Governor's grandfather insisted on marketing his basket of fruit with the worst berries on top so as not to mislead his customers. In contrast, Pataki writes, the unreliable Cuomo would have sneakily put all his best fruit on top. For some people all politics is not only local but agricultural.

After many chapters on poverty on the farm, it is something of a surprise to find that after high school Pataki went to Yale like his brother (who was on scholarship) before him, then to Columbia Law School and after that spent several years as a Wall Street lawyer before returning to Peekskill and, eventually, a life in politics. Although no Pataki now lives on the farm, it was to Peekskill that he went this spring to announce his candidacy for re-election.

In his book's finale he offers proof that New Yorkers were realizing their dreams because he was Governor: ''The tomatoes planted in April were bearing fruit.'' If he should decide to make having personally tilled the soil a credential for some future race, there is a slogan at the ready. Prominently printed at the beginning of this book is the ''Pataki family motto'': ''Pray for a good harvest, but keep hoeing.''